Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.

One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.

The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.